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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

True for weather events that are within the previously established long term range of variability. When you have completely unprecedented events, that have no known historical equivalent and it happens more than once in recent history, then I think it's legitimate.

There's a clip I remember of an interview with the CEO of an oil company from I think the 90s, where he says something like "They keep saying hurricanes will become stronger and more likely. Where are they? Where are these hurricanes?". IIRC it was several years before Katrina. I wish I could find it on Youtube.

Well, now those extreme weather events are happening with increasing regularity. I think it's reasonable to say, you know those extreme weather events climate scientists have been talking about for decades? There they are!

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But the problem with your example is that Katrina wasn't even that impressive of a hurricane and not at all unprecedented from a weather perspective. It was "only" a category 3 at landfall. A major hurricane, sure. But major hurricanes happen nearly every year (throughout recorded weather history too). It just hit a really bad spot and it was mostly human failures that created the disaster that it was. Undersized levees, broken pumps, sheer mismanagement of evacuations, total breakdown of government services, a failure to provide housing or relief afterwards.

The increasing frequency of these events is climate change driven, but any given one can't be traced directly to climate change. A 10% increase in hurricanes is climate change driven. A single hurricane hitting a specific spot isn't

When a "100 year storm" starts happening every 2-3 years and devastating local economies, you can attribute that to climate change.

Unless there are fewer than 100 places, you'd expect at least one 100 year storm somewhere every year.

Well, do you think the parent comment meant 100 year storms anywhere, or did they mean in the same area, based on the context of what they said?

Are we still talking about Katrina? Has New Orleans been hit by five Katrinas since 2005?

From insurance rates and lack of investment it would seem like it (I live here)

Hopefully we're still not trying to be contrarians around climate change just because it's hard to imagine or scary, since it's obvious and affecting things around us every year.

Another insurance company is leaving Florida: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/real-estate/os-bz-i...

1/3 of Pakistan is currently underwater: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pakistan-floods-un-appeal...

Greenland: https://apnews.com/article/science-oceans-glaciers-greenland...

> Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheet will eventually raise global sea level by at least 10.6 inches (27 centimeters) -- more than twice as much as previously forecast — according to a study published Monday.

They didn't all directly hit New Orleans, but: Ivan, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, and Michael are all cat-5 hurricanes that have hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in the last 20 years. There have been 37 cat-5 hurricanes since record keeping began in 1851; of those, 8 happened during the 2000s and 6 more during the 2010s, so about 37% of recorded cat-5 hurricanes have happened in the last 20 years of this 170-year period.

Your point is underrated. There are alot of sampling bias going around.

That is correct, for any given area you’d expect one 100 year storm for that area roughly every hundred years. When you start seeing them in that area every 10 years or so, interspersed with occasional 1,000 year storms every few decades, that’s an indicator something is going badly wrong.

Absolutely. But not the individual storm. Just the frequency of those storms

Similarly:

A bullet could have glanced off their head at any point in time. Without proper ballistics, their death can't be traced to the game of Russian roulette they were playing all by themselves in the middle of a field. If anything is to blame, it's the lack of funding for a rural gunshot detection network and helicopter-based emergency services.

> Katrina wasn't even that impressive of a hurricane

I guess that depends on your definition of impressive. It was a Category 5 storm and the 4th most intense hurricane on record to make landfall in the United States. At the time it was the 5th most powerful Atlantic storm on record and the most powerful ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. That season was so crazy that it ended up getting passed by Rita and Wilma later in the year, but it's still the 7th most powerful Atlantic storm by pressure and 10th by sustained winds. Your overall point might be correct, but you're wrong about Katrina just being some run of the mill storm.

I think it made landfall just below Cat 5

It was cat3 at landfall, though a strong cat3

It weakened significantly before landfall though. Still a major hurricane, but the human toll was a failure of systems, not because the storm was that strong

Almost all hurricanes weaken significantly before making landfall. Maybe the wording was confusing but Katrina was the 4th most intense atlantic storm on record at the time of landfall. The Hurricane Severity Index which combines size and intensity has Katrina tied for 3rd at the time of landfall.

I agree the human toll was primarily a systems failure, but the destructive power of Katrina was a major contributing factor. A less intense storm with milder storm surge likely wouldn't have breached all the levees that were breached.

You're completely right that Katrina was an example of an event you should expect (albeit infrequently) and that there was a cascading response failure.

Cascading response failures are definitely an organizational/social problem; any natural disaster is going to be worse where planning is subject to complacency, corruption, or lack of resources.

The basic problem is that most of our infrastructure and governance (including things like building codes and zoning/planning) is set up for a mid-late 20th century understanding and frequency awareness of extreme weather events.

That's even pushing it. Texas had a 20-year freeze and it pushed the grid to failure!

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